Just a week after Boris Johnson's UK, even France "sides" with the US in the race for 5G and decides, in fact, to exclude the Chinese group Huawei from its market. The news had been anticipated by Les Echos and is confirmed by the Reuters agency: the transalpine telecommunications operators, following the decision of Anssi (the government agency for the security of information systems), will no longer be able to renew the temporary authorizations obtained to use equipment for the 5G network sold by Huawei, thus leaving the field free for the other two suppliers, the "Western" (more welcome in Washington, which is also funding them to stem Chinese technological expansion) Nokia and Ericsson.
The ploy found by France is actually very convoluted: Huawei has not been officially banned from the market, as the Minister of Economy Bruno Le Maire was also keen to point out, but in fact it is. Meanwhile, because the authorizations granted to operators (SFR et Bouygues Telecom, which already use Huawei infrastructure on 50% of the 4G network) have been much shorter than the legal maximum of 8 years. And then because, in fact, they will not be renewable. So faced with such a short and non-extendable collaboration (a TLC network has a life of about 15 years), the hypothesis of linking the construction of the 5G network to Huawei is in fact more than discouraged. A very important technological infrastructure not only because it will enable the fourth industrial revolution, that of robots and artificial intelligence, but also because it is increasingly a geopolitical battleground, with the United States which does not want Chinese technology to penetrate the Western world.
And so far Europe has answered "present". If the United Kingdom is now out of the Union, the same cannot be said of France, whose decision therefore takes on a very strong meaning. All while Germany continues to collaborate with the Chinese group and Italy gets by. An official stop to Huawei hasn't come from us either, but in the meantime Tim has excluded the Chinese giant, unquestionably at the forefront in the production of equipment for 5G (and economically convenient), from the tender for the core part, i.e. software and services. Experts say that it is an exclusion for technical reasons, but in the meantime it is not known exactly how the operators are organizing themselves.
Huawei, in Italy, has already been chosen (together with Nokia and Ericsson) by Tim, Vodafone and Wind Tre in the experimental phase of 5G. And the Government continues to focus strongly on 5G, which through the Simplifications Decree it put an end to the veto power of the Municipalities on the installation of antennas. But who will be buying the antennas from?
